The release of Adobe Muse CC 2014 includes significant improvements in both the application and the HTML/CSS code it generates, continuing our pattern of improving the quality of code with every release. Prior versions of Adobe Muse CC were built on Adobe AIR. Adobe Muse CC 2014 is a 64-bit native application and requires a 64-bit operating system. Users will begin seeing differences immediately as the interface has been updated to support high definition screens and provide freedom to arrange windows and palettes as in other Adobe applications. More significantly, we’ve added several improvements to the code generated by Adobe Muse CC.

Smarter HD Websites

Adobe Muse CC 2014 introduces support for Creating High Resolution Websites that render high-resolution images on high-resolution devices, standard resolution images on standard devices without the performance penalty of loading the high-resolution images, and an optional HiDPI (on/off) Button Widget that can be placed on a page to enable site visitors to disable HD rendering when viewing from a high-resolution device on a slow network.

On a High Definition (a.k.a. Retina) display the area occupied by one pixel on a standard display is replaced by at least four pixels. That is, each pixel is at most half as wide and half as tall. Therefore, taking full advantage of all these tiny pixels requires just as many pixels in the images displayed on a website. However, four times as much data means roughly four times as long to load that data and website visitors are impatient. The tendency of site visitors to abandon a site and give it negative reviews after only a couple of seconds is well documented in articles by the New York Times, Radware, KISSmetrics, and others.

Many HD websites have two problems:

They download both the HD image and the standard resolution image, resulting in five times as much data even on standard resolution devices.

They do not give site visitors the option to disable the HD rendering on HD devices running on a slow network.

For HD enabled websites, Muse automatically generates standard resolution and 2x resolution images and then loads the appropriate version for the device from which it is being viewed. Images that are Placed into a Muse layout are exported as HTML <img> elements. Images that are imported as background fills are exported as background-image CSS properties. In both cases, the images are imported into Muse at half their natural dimensions. At export time, an image is generated at half-resolution for standard displays and the high-resolution image is exported for high-resolution devices. The image that is rendered by the browser is determined based on the properties of the viewing device and whether or not HD rendering has been disabled using Muse’s option HiDPI (on/off) Button Widget.

HD Handling of Placed Images

Images Placed into Muse are exported as <img> elements. The standard resolution images are referenced by default in the ‘src’ attribute. The 2x resolution image has the same name as the standard resolution image with “_2x” appended and is referenced by the ‘hidpi-src’ data property. At page load time, if the device pixel to html pixel ratio is at least 1.5 and HD rendering has not been disabled using Muse’s optional HiDPI (on/off) Button Widget, then the ‘src’ attribute will be updated to reference the HD image.

Rendering of the high-resolution background images on the page is achieved by adding the ‘hidpi’ class to the html element as follows:

<html class="html hidpi js">

When viewed on a standard resolution device, the HD images are completely ignored thereby avoiding a performance penalty.

The HiDPI (on/off) Button Widget

Anyone who has attempted to watch an HD video on the web over a slow connection knows it is not enough to automatically switch to serving up HD content based on the resolution of the display. Ultimately, the site visitor needs to be given the option to disable HD content. Adobe Muse CC 2014 solves this problem by providing an HD Button which can be custom styled within Muse. When present on a page of the site, visitors who are viewing on a high resolution display can toggle the rendering behavior of the site by clicking the button.

HD rendering is on and supported by the display.

HD rendering is available but deactivated.

The display does not support HD rendering.

In-Browser Editing Anywhere

With the release of Adobe Muse CC 2014, the In-Browser Editing feature is available for any site that is published using the built-in FTP Upload feature.

One of the Muse team’s goals is to give designers the freedom to publish anywhere. Adobe Muse CC 5.0 introduced In-Browser Editing on sites published to Adobe Business Catalyst, where site owners could replace images or make changes to text from within the browser. That is, the content of the site could be updated without using Adobe Muse CC. When an Adobe Business Catalyst site was opened in Muse, Adobe Muse CC would merge any edits made via In-Browser Editing back into the Muse document.

In the future we plan to add new custom form features which can be used by sites published to any hosting provider supporting PHP. In addition, we plan to make it easier to publish to your favorite host directly from Adobe Muse CC.

The Benefits of Dropping Internet Explorer 7

As noted in a previous post, we’ve made the conscious decision to drop support for IE7 in Adobe Muse CC 2014 to provide a better experience in more modern browsers. For example, in order to support 100% width elements in IE7, we used hand-coded JavaScript to adjust the width at runtime resulting in a performance lag. If you re-export your site from Adobe Muse CC 2014, the 100% width elements will use CSS to adjust the width resulting in faster performance and a better rendering experience. As always, you merely need to re-export your site from the latest release of Adobe Muse CC to benefit from this and numerous other code improvements and bug fixes.